Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years

Contents

Introduction

Chapter I        The Red Balloon

Chapter II      Shuffling Up Your Downs

Chapter III     Proud To Be Your Slave

Chapter IV     Thirty-Five Sweet Goodbyes

Chapter V      Slow Hand Row

Chapter VI     Laughing At The Frozen Rain

Picture Section A

Chapter VII     Luckless Pedestrians

Chapter VIII  The Crimson Tide

Chapter IX      Bodacious Cowboys

Chapter X       New Frontier

Picture Section B

Chapter XI      Big Noise, New York

Chapter XII    C’mon Snakehips

Chapter XIII   Sizzling Like An Isotope

Chapter XIV   Third Hand Rose

Chapter XV    Pamela’s Pistol Dawn

Chapter XVI   Heroic Escapades

Recommend to a Friend

Also Available...

UK Discography

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Introduction

Reelin’ In The Years

Steely Dan’s forty-plus years and counting career has been the proverbial rollercoaster ride. When Walter Becker and Donald Fagen assembled their band in 1972, they were young, idealistic and ambitious. In their wildest dreams, they could not possibly have expected to have been so successful so quickly, but the sheen of their success was rapidly tarnished by constant touring and by frequent awful sound quality. Becker and Fagen disbanded their creation after their third album and moved into a second phase, whereby they began hiring crack sessions players to execute their devilishly tricky tunes in the studio. This was the Steely Dan which its auteurs loved most of all, but not necessarily the one their fans loved most of all.

Then in 1977 came Aja – a classic recording if ever there was one. By the late Seventies, they had everything: health, wealth, the envy and admiration of their peers and critics alike and a rosy future. But by 1981, a mere nine years after they had begun, it was all over; the dip in their fortunes this time down to some of the most obvious pitfalls of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, fast-living, drugs and creative burnout. Becker and Fagen had achieved so much throughout the seventies, it was inevitable that the party would end. And end it did with a vengeance: the eighties brought a litany of problems – writer’s block, depression, failed relationships, a lurid court case and even death. However, Becker and Fagen survived relatively intact and eventually came back to prominence with the resurrection first of a touring Steely Dan and then as a recording band again.

These past few years have seen Steely Dan increasingly reliant on touring over recording, which says a lot about the parlous state of the modern music business – the execrable One Direction and the like. It also reveals something very interesting and unsettling about our duo. There is now a definite sense of that lengthy career gradually winding down, perhaps not through choice but due to both physical and psychological elements beyond their control.

They may be over 60 now, they may not be quite the workaholics of old and they certainly are not the most attractive looking middle-aged guys on the planet, but Walter Becker and Donald Fagen can still write a mighty good tune, and by God, isn’t that something?

Brian Sweet, June 2014

Chapter I

The Red Balloon

Barely a month after collecting the Best Album of the Year award at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards in February 2001 in Los Angeles from Bette Midler and Stevie Wonder, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were back on home turf at the splendour of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan for Steely Dan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It had been a crazy time just lately.

The unlucky inductor was Moby who looked distinctly nervous and edgy; walking on stage looking embarrassed, his speech on a sheaf of paper in his hands. To compound his unease, the speech had not been entered into the teleprompter. He feigned making his entrance once again, trying to overcome his disquiet and the audience’s expectant silence. Why are they asking me, he wondered aloud? He was flattered yet suspicious. He said as far as he knew Steely Dan seemed to hate everybody and he was expecting some monstrous practical joke right here and now on the stage. Nonetheless he was honoured to be inducting Steely Dan. Despite a visceral quality to their music, he said he did not consider them to be a kick-ass, balls-to-the-wall, brainless rock band. Steely Dan was cerebral, intellectual and beautiful as well. The audience of musicians and music business suits were feeling uneasy too; there was a definite sense that they weren’t quite sure where, when or if to laugh.

Moby explained that he had tried to find some biographical information about Steely Dan on the internet but there were too many apocryphal stories: they had been members of the infamous Baader Meinhof terrorist organization in Germany and they had spent time training circus elephants. No doubt, Becker and Fagen were creased up laughing on the sidelines. Moby remembered listening to FM on the radio in the late Seventies with his friend and they were both amazed that Steely Dan had succeeded in getting the lyric fucked-up muzak onto the air (of course, the lyric was actually funked-up muzak). This was the subversive and weird Steely Dan that people loved.

Becker and Fagen came on to shake hands with their inductor, Fagen, as usual, looking distinctly uncomfortable behind his shades. He tried to crack a joke about the number of musicians who had played with them over the years and swiftly looked to Becker to take over and relieve him of his discomfort. We are persuaded it’s a great honour to be here tonight, Becker said none too convincingly.

Steely Dan took to the stage and performed a run-of-the-mill version of ‘Black Friday’, just as they had done many times before; Becker right to the fore on lead guitar and Fagen wearing his Ray Charles-style sunglasses. Fagen stood up before the final chords had been played, raising his arms to elicit applause for the band, gave a perfunctory wave to the audience and was heading off stage almost before the applause had begun.

Becker and Fagen had been perpetuating a long-running Hall of Fame gag on their website for several years, writing witty letters to the Los Angeles Times and their then manager Craig Fruin, about when and whether or not they were going to be inducted that year or not. Some of the letters concerned their pernickety requirements for fees and expenses, issues never discussed in public, especially for shows like this.

Under the headline Thanks!, they had listed fully 182 alphabetically arranged names of session players, engineers and assistant engineers, photographers, album designers and project coordinators who had worked on Steely Dan albums throughout the years. Subsequently, they proceeded to carry out a mock auction of the trophies on eBay; the items were Ultra rare!, the seller’s name was Moody Bastard and he was eager to be rid of this appalling artefact.

Becker and Fagen had several times before spoken of their distaste for such awards ceremonies. They often only had to look at the names above or below Steely Dan in the list and their disdain was palpable and would be voiced in no uncertain terms. They had long been cultivating their reputation as outsiders; literate, intellectual and way above your average rock ’n’ roller and just because they’d been admitted to this Rock and Roll – Rock and Roll, Steely Dan! – Hall of Fame, they weren’t about to change now.

The Second World War was still raw and fresh in the memory of those who had lived through those six long years of slaughter and incredible hardship. As ever, time moves inexorably on and now 1948 would be another momentous year but for very different reasons. The State of Israel was founded, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, Harry Truman was reelected as the 33rd President of the USA, the Ashgabat earthquake in the Soviet Union killed more than 100,000 people, TS Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in baseball Joe diMaggio hit three consecutive home runs and Babe Ruth died.

On a somewhat less momentous level, Donald Jay Fagen was born very early in that year, on Saturday, January 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, a town of 55,00 inhabitants in north eastern New Jersey on America’s east coast. Donald was the first child and only son of Jospeh Jerry Fagen, a Jewish accountant, and his wife, Elinor. Six years later they had a daughter called Susan.

If Donald Fagen inherited any of his musical talent, it probably came from his mother who, between the ages of 12 and 17, sang with a band at a small hotel in Parksville in what was popularly known as the Borscht Belt, a predominantly Jewish resort area among the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Elinor loved singing and, each summer, performed popular songs of the era with a small group of musicians until increasingly serious attacks of stage fright forced her to discontinue. I have a bit of that myself, her son would later admit.

A lover of all types of music, particularly Broadway musicals, Elinor Fagen sang almost constantly around the house while Donald was growing up and he attributes his own peculiar vocal phrasing to his mother’s influence. She had a large record collection and would sing along to songs by singers who were popular in the early Fifties, among them Tommy Dorsey, Helen O’Connell and Sylvia Sims. I can’t ever remember when there was silence around the house, Donald has recalled. She was either playing records or singing. She was an excellent phraser and I think just listening to her sing all my life gave me a natural swing type of feel.

When Donald was 10 and in sixth grade, the family moved from Passaic to Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and soon afterwards moved again to a ranch-style home in Kendall Park, also in New Jersey, which was close to Princeton University. Donald disliked the neighbourhood; it was true suburbia. Writing about this period of his life in The Nightfly he described it as… One of the worst suburbs I’ve ever seen. It was a brand new development with houses that were all exactly identical, mounds of dirt instead of lawns and those little twigs instead of trees. It was very desolate and totally stultifying. To me it was like a prison. I was very upset about it. I think after that I had a different attitude towards my parents. I think I lost faith in their judgement. What I mainly realised was their judgement wasn’t the same as mine, their view of life was different. In fact, it was probably the first time I realised I had my own view of life.

From a very young age, Donald would fall asleep listening to music. His first love was rock’n’roll, especially Chuck Berry, whose ‘Reelin’ And Rockin was the first record he bought. He liked the lyrics and that nasty strident sound, as he would later describe it. But rock’n’roll was rapidly superseded by a precocious preference for jazz. It was very fashionable at the time for kids to go to the Newport Jazz Festival, Fagen has said. For some it was probably for the social thing – probably for the majority. My cousin told me what radio station to listen to, I heard some of their records and was knocked out. My sister started taking piano lessons and I started learning to play off those records. I became a real jazz snob. I lost interest in rock’n’roll and started developing an antisocial personality."

By the time Donald was 11 he was listening to Symphony Sid’s jazz radio show from Manhattan and he can recall finding a record in a shop – pianist Red Garland’s Jazz Junction – that he had heard played on Symphony Sid’s show. I went down to E. J. Korvette’s and there it was right in this bin, along with a lot of other albums with unfamiliar names. I bought it and ever since I’ve tried to imitate his style in the privacy of my own home.

With jazz now his preferred choice of music, Donald developed a strong prejudice against rock’n’roll. Part of the reason was the dearth of authentic rock’n’roll that swept America after the first wave of rockers disappeared in the late Fifties. Elvis was in the army, Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee Lewis was ostracised for marrying his 13-year-old cousin and Buddy Holly was dead. Others, by dint of circumstance or action by conservative forces, had been temporarily silenced. In the early Sixties you started having a lot of cover records, white copies, white rock’n’roll records and Frankie Avalon, and they stopped playing a lot of black music for a couple of years there, and I lost interest in it, Donald explained. His prejudice against rock’n’roll would last until 1966 after America had been invaded by British groups, spearheaded by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

When he was 12 years old, his parents bought Donald a piano and it was evident from his early efforts that he had a talent for the instrument. The first song he played was ‘Exodus’, the theme from the Otto Preminger film that was a hit for Ferrante & Teicher in 1960. Although it was Donald’s younger sister, Susan, who studied piano first, the Fagens took Donald to the Princeton New School of Music, where they assumed he would probably want to take lessons in order to make the most of his talent. Donald played ‘Exodus’ for the teacher, who noted that he played good chords, but said that she couldn’t teach him unless he was prepared to learn to sight read. On the way home in the car Donald told his parents that he had no interest in learning to sight read, he just wanted to play. In the end he continued with his constant practice but took no formal lessons. As soon as he arrived home from school each day, he would sit down at the piano and play his favourite songs for hours on end. He also started composing his own material: Little songs about mythological subjects and stuff we learned in school.

The only real tuition he received came from a family friend who visited the Fagen home and showed Donald some jazz chords. Later, when Donald was 15, his father drove him into Princeton to attend a music theory course run by a New York Times music critic named Wilson. Donald loved it, although he didn’t fully appreciate all the theory. Most of his tuition came from listening to jazz records and emulating the chords he heard.

When a couple of jazz-loving elder cousins befriended Donald, he became something of a jazz elitist and, in the cool fashion of the times, took to wearing black turtleneck sweaters. More importantly, he spent so much time playing the piano, he didn’t have many neighbourhood or school friends. Most weekends, he and his cousins took the bus into Manhattan to visit jazz clubs and watch performers like Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Charlie Mingus. Donald has recalled how on one occasion at a Charlie Mingus gig at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village, he sat in the kiddies’ section – the banquettes along the wall right next to the drum kit – and the power of Dannie Richmond’s drumming caused his glass of Coke to keep sliding towards the edge of the table. He had to continually push it back to the centre of his table to stop it falling onto the floor. Donald was most impressed. A measure of his dedication to attending these gigs can be gleaned from the fact that if he missed his last bus home he was stranded. On one occasion he did miss the last bus home and was forced to spend the night in the Port Authority bus terminal sleeping on a bench. His parents were blissfully unaware of this but midtown Manhattan was a considerably safer place in those days.

Donald attended South Brunswick High School in New Jersey, where he shunned most of his fellow students in a typical display of cultural superiority. However, he did participate in some of the school activities, playing a baritone horn in the school marching band. In his High School Yearbook he is described as a jazz enthusiast (he formed a jazz trio there), an individualist and a thinker. He harboured journalistic ambitions and contributed to the school magazine, and there is evidence to suggest that his cynical, acerbic personality was already past the development stage. It was the custom at South Brunswick for each pupil to make a will on leaving and, in his, Fagen left seven barrels of steaming, fetid boredom. One of the few sporting interests he developed was a fondness for table tennis – a pastime that has continued to this day.

When the Fagens acquired a black-and-white cabinet TV in the late Fifties, Donald enjoyed detective shows, particularly Peter Gunn, and grew to love Henry Mancini’s jazz-based theme music. He even bought a number of Peter Gunn soundtrack albums and Mancini records, and often mentioned TV-style arrangements when discussing Steely Dan’s music in later years. He would write about his love for Henry Mancini in an article in Premiere magazine in 1987.

A fan of the Beat Poets, Jack Kerouac in particular, Donald went to Bard College in 1965 to study English Literature. His first room-mate was an art student named Lonnie Yongue, who had already been at Bard for two years when Fagen arrived, so he took on the responsibility of showing the newcomer around. Like Donald, Yongue was trying to teach himself to play the saxophone but, unlike Donald, he kept unusual hours, staying up all night painting and sleeping during the day. He was also a heavy drinker who experimented with a variety of drugs and, in his own words, blacked out almost every night. Yongue and Donald lived like Cox and Box, with Yongue getting up as Donald prepared for bed and going to bed when Donald was getting up. When their paths occasionally crossed, Yongue would say, Good morning, Fagen, and Donald would respond with, Jesus, Lonnie, you’ve turned it all around.

Some students, including Donald, made sandwiches to sell in the dormitories after ten o’clock to make a little much-needed extra money. Yongue’s studio was adjacent to their kitchen and Fagen listened while his room-mate read aloud passages from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch as the sandwiches were being prepared. Tuna salad was their biggest seller and Yongue positively hated tuna. Cleaning up after the caterers was not one of Yongue’s most treasured Bard memories.

Yongue soon recognised Donald’s true vocation and questioned why he was studying English Literature and not music. Eventually he helped persuade Fagen to switch to music but he was miserable, Yongue has said. Despite this, in the summer of 1966 Donald went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for the summer, but his heart wasn’t really in it and he admitted later that he spent most of his time goofing around on the street and smoking pot with his friends.

While he was at Berklee his music teacher apparently landed a job he couldn’t possibly afford to pass up, so he gave Donald three months’ worth of tuition in one lesson. Fittingly, Donald lived on Symphony Road and remembers, It was a foul summer. I had almost no money and was eating a lot of brown rice. But I picked up a lot of good stuff from the Berklee course. I remember the practice rooms were always being used at Berklee, so I’d take the bus up to MIT and use their practice rooms. Amazingly, MIT had these great practice rooms with little pianos in them. You’d go to this huge vault-like door and open it up and go in. I’m sure I could have survived a nuclear holocaust in one of those rooms. But it was great; the pianos were tuned up really nicely and I’d just play scales all day. And eat brown rice. But I never had the patience to be a professional musician. There are great gaps in my musical knowledge. I’m mostly self taught.

Disillusioned with the teaching methods and lacking the discipline needed for a serious music course, Fagen returned to Bard after his summer at Berklee and resumed his English Literature course. They were no longer room-mates but, when Lonnie Yongue bought Traffic’s 1967 album Mr. Fantasy Fagen borrowed a copy and hung on to it for a long time; he was heavily influenced by the album. When Yongue did a painting of Fagen and himself, with Fagen on one side of a big room and Yongue on the other, Yongue’s art teacher told him it was a classic study in alienation. Both parties fit the bill. Unfortunately, the painting was destroyed in a fire in 1967. In his final year, Donald wrote an extensive Senior Class Project on the novels of Hermann Hesse, including Siddhartha, Narziss und Goldmund and Peter Camenzind. He eventually graduated in 1969.

During his time at Bard, Donald did take some formal music lessons: I learned music theory and harmony at college, but didn’t get as far as harsh discipline in music, he has recalled. I studied some orchestration and composition and definitely knew I was going for a career in music of some kind, even though I ended up with a degree in literature. He often speculated that if he hadn’t made it in the music business, he would have probably ended up as an English teacher.

But the real turning point in Fagen’s life occurred two years before graduation, on an autumn day in 1967 when he was walking past the college music club at Bard. Most days he would have bypassed the building without so much as a second thought, but the music flowing from the room that day stopped him in his tracks. He went inside to investigate and found a baby-faced, bespectacled blond kid sitting on the stage, cradling a red Epiphone guitar and playing what sounded to Donald like very authentic blues licks.

Fagen would remember the encounter clearly years later. (He had) a little amplifier turned up all the way, bending notes and getting sustain. He’d been listening to all these Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King records. Well, I’d never really heard anything like that.

So he approached the guitarist and introduced himself. The guitar player was called Walter Becker.

The other half of the duo who would become Steely Dan was a couple of years younger than Donald Fagen. Walter Becker was born on Monday, February 20, 1950, in the Forest Hills area of Queens in New York. Like Donald, he has one sister, Wendy, who is three years his junior.

The first music Walter Becker remembers hearing was Fifties pop music. Rosemary Clooney comes to mind, he recalls. I remember (hearing her) in the back of my father’s car driving down the West Side Highway in New York City. Like Fagen, Becker developed a similarly precocious love of jazz, but failed to learn the saxophone and in 1966 took up the guitar instead. I was a self-taught player. I learned mostly from other players, he says.

Walter’s ambition to become a saxophone player was inspired by Charlie Parker, but as a budding guitarist, he’d taken some guitar lessons from a young neighbourhood kid who called himself Randy California, who’d moved to New York from his native Los Angeles in 1966 to do session work. California shared the same birthday as Becker except he was a year younger, and he taught Becker some blues guitar tricks and techniques. California himself had been taught to play by his drum-playing stepfather, Ed Cassidy. Originally called Randy Wolfe, he changed his name to California and later went on to form Spirit with Cassidy and two ex-members of The Red Roosters.

Becker and California lived close to each other in Forest Hills and Becker owned a Gibson Les Paul guitar, which he kept at California’s apartment and tried to sell to him for $50. California, who was still only 15, thought the instrument was too heavy and resisted the deal. Becker played bass when he and California played with some other local musicians.

California lived a penurious existence in a rough neighbourhood with his mother, three sisters and Ed Cassidy in a basement flat. His mother taught him his first chords when he was eight years old, so he was able to give the eternally keen Becker some basic instruction. But Walter’s initial attraction to the guitar was frustrated by his inability to get beyond the technique he had devised for himself so he switched to bass guitar, which he found easier. I was attracted to the idea of only four strings, he said. This would simplify matters considerably.

Becker attended Stuyvesant High School in New York and started at Bard College in 1967. He enjoyed hanging out there, but neglected his studies and later admitted… I wasn’t very impressed with the programme. They were asking me to read stupid books and get up early in the morning. I couldn’t relate to that at all. I did meet some interesting people there. It was basically a good scene for my disasters. Becker only stayed for three semesters, studying languages, before flunking out.

Becker was 17 years old and had only been at Bard for one semester when Donald Fagen chanced on his playing in the college music club. In fact, he had already approached Fagen once about joining one of his groups on guitar, but at that point Fagen already had three occasional guitar players, although none of them were particularly skilled on the instrument. Now Donald had good reason to reassess Becker’s worth.

He had a three-man guitar section, Walter has said. One guy who played badly and offensively, one guy who played very crudely and one guy who just wore the guitar in an interesting way. At the time, Donald was trying to incorporate jazz ideas into the band against considerable resistance from the other members.

The band went under the name of The Leather Canary but at various other times Donald would change the personnel – and name – to suit the gig. The Bad Rock Group might play the Hallowe’en party, while The Don Fagen Trio might play wherever a gig was available or at charity benefits such as NAACP nights. Bard College wasn’t blessed with too many competent musicians, but Fagen was the piano-playing jack of all trades who could at short notice assemble whichever type of group was needed for whatever kind of dance or party.

Now, by a stroke of good fortune, Donald had heard what Walter Becker could play. That he was considerably more talented than any of the other guitarists in Donald’s groups was obvious, but equally important was their discovery that they both listened to the same jazz radio stations and disc jockeys that broadcast from Manhattan, liked the same genre of Beat writers – William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – and, perhaps more significant in the long term, shared a similar dry sense of humour. They had so much in common that an immediate and lasting friendship was formed.

We were writing songs together within a day of meeting each other, Donald said. We had both been jazz fans since we were nine or 10 years old, listened to the same jazz shows and radio and we both got into soul and pop in the mid-Sixties. The songs they began to write reflected their caustic sense of humour, their depth of academic knowledge and their taste in arcane lyrics.

The rapidly established bond between Becker and Fagen convinced the latter to find a place for his younger partner in one of his groups. Donald was excited by the encounter and reckoned that he had made a significant breakthrough in his long-running quest for a partner who shared his own idealistic musical aspirations.

We were jazz fans, he said. We were writing tunes where some of the chords weren’t triads and you couldn’t use your capo that much. It was very bizarre. The bands that we came up with sounded like The Kingsmen performing Frank Zappa material.

Donald was the dean of the pick-up band syndrome at Bard, said Walter. At the beginning of every term someone would reopen the club and they’d need a band for two nights. There were about eight musicians on the whole campus, and most of them were poor. Most of our bands were made up of guys who hadn’t mastered your basic Dave Van Ronk techniques. They had a limited exposure to the things that we were trying to emulate. There were never enough people to put together a band where everybody was a strong player.

Although they started working together, they had no real plan as to how to proceed, other than that they wanted to form a band good enough to warrant a recording contract. Their main problem was finding singers. Donald had never sung before. Walter had done a few gigs at the Night Owl in the Village before he got to college so I was sort of hoping he would sing, but neither of us wanted to do it, he said. Additionally, Becker had aspirations towards becoming a bass player but nobody seemed to need one, so he reverted to the guitar for the time being and, in a poker game at Bard, won a huge JBL Malibu speaker with 1,000lb of sand in the bottom. Walter liked nothing better than cranking up his Telecaster through the JBL and blasting Jimi Hendrix solos all over Ward Manor.

Donald Fagen was as meticulous then as he became later in his life when it came to auditioning musicians. Several of his friends tried out for his band at Bard but he wouldn’t lower his standards, not even for close pals. Almost all of them were given the thumbs down. Some of them understood; others didn’t. In the early days we were going to put together a band that was modelled on The Velvet Underground, said Donald. We auditioned a few girls to have the Nico role. At the time, of course, the Velvets had yet to acquire the Bohemian chic they would attain long after their demise, and as another Bard student commented, auditioning girls was a full-time occupation anyway.

In fact, rehearsal space at Bard was difficult to find until one entrepreneurial student hit on the idea of using an abandoned chicken coop. He stuck egg crates to the walls to act as soundproofing and various Bard bands used the room. There were several drawbacks: in the summer the overpowering heat often led to the hippest characters on campus being reduced to stripping down to their underpants in order to survive conditions, and then there was a very low ceiling that bruised many a skull when players stood upright without due care.

A requirement of the music department at Bard was the equivalent of an oral examination, which took the form of a performance. The student had to select a piece and then perform it in front of the lecturers and any guests invited by the student. Most of the students chose a classical piece, but Fagen got a very large band of musicians together and performed a nine-minute reading of Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. The band consisted of two acoustic pianos, an electric piano, bass, drums, three guitars, percussion and organ and sounded like Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. The examiners had never before heard anything like it and were aghast.

A fellow student of Becker and Fagen’s at Bard College was Terence Boylan, affectionately known as Boona, one time member of The Appletree Theatre and writer on the Buffalo Broadside. Through their mutual interest in music, Boylan had got to know Becker and Fagen well and had struck up a friendship with them. They played occasional gigs together and a particularly memorable one was at a dance in Blithewood where their set featured The Temptations’ ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’, Martha and The Vandellas’ ‘Dancin’ In The Streets’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Route 66’, several Dylan tunes including ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ and ‘Outlaw Blues’, and Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’. They had only managed two rehearsals and were therefore reduced to repeating the set and jamming to fill in time. They even played Becker and Fagen’s own composition ‘Who Got The Credit?’, and Walter Becker later admitted that they played ‘Route 66’ no less than five times.

Terence Boylan maintains that Becker and Fagen’s personalities were already well developed at Bard; while most other students were at emotional and intellectual sixes and sevens, Becker and Fagen were already in the process of cultivating the acute sense of irony that would become the basis of Steely Dan. They seemed to know exactly what they wanted in any given situation.

On one occasion they sat Boylan down to explain to him their version of the history of the world. First came the formation of the planet, the cooling of the earth, the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, then Charlie Parker and it’s been downhill ever since. Becker and Fagen firmly believed that all musical innovation ceased after Bird; all who followed had merely found ways to blow his riffs in slower or slightly different forms.

Boylan was very much influenced by Van Morrison, The Band and early Bob Dylan. When he secured a recording deal with MGM, he enlisted Becker and Fagen’s assistance with the album and they helped him arrange all his own compositions before they went into the studio. The album was recorded at the Hit Factory (owned by songwriter/producer Jerry Ragavoy) and this was the first time that Becker and Fagen had been into a real recording studio. Walter Becker especially was impressed by the potential of multitrack recording and the array of studio gimmickry, and kept asking questions; Fagen, on the other hand, was much more concerned with getting the parts right. Both were amazed that they were getting paid for doing something that they loved doing and had been doing for free anyway at Bard. They were also impressed by the timing of session drummers Herb Lovelle, Jimmy Johnson and Darius Davenport.

Jerry Ragavoy suggested that Boylan might like to hire session bass player Chuck Rainey for a couple of the songs; he did play on one but it didn’t make the final cut. Boylan had written all the songs himself – including his own arrangement of Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, which he retitled ‘Pillow’ – and produced the album himself. Boylan attempted a Becker and Fagen composition called ‘Stone Piano’ but it was in Fagen’s key and he dropped the song – a decision he later regretted. Boylan admitted steering Fagen into playing piano parts that he wanted to hear, though Fagen could probably have come up with something better.

Becker overdubbed the guitar parts and the album was recorded in less than two weeks, and that included some marathon 10–12 hour sessions. Alias Boona was recorded and mixed for $21,000, which was slightly over budget. Boylan moved to another studio to mix the record and admitted that with all the technical problems, he blew it. The only interesting thing about that record was the fact that it was our first real experience of a modern recording studio, said Fagen later.

Boylan had met photographer Elliott Landy at Bob Dylan’s house in Woodstock when he called to show Dylan some photos he had taken for Nashville Skyline. Boylan hired him to take the cover photo of Alias Boona, which showed him with his parents’ Old English Sheepdog.

Boylan and his elder brother John were staff writers/producers, and Boylan took Becker and Fagen to see his publishers, Koppelman and Rubin, who had been responsible for signing Tim Hardin and The Lovin’ Spoonful. They had recently signed Petula Clark and were looking for material for her, and Becker and Fagen played them two songs, ‘Who Got The Credit?’ and ‘Bus Driver Is A Fruitcake’. Not surprisingly, Koppleman and Rubin scratched their heads and had no idea what the songs were about… they certainly weren’t suitable for Petula Clark.

After the release of Alias Boona, Boylan and his band, including Becker, Fagen and Herb Lovelle, rehearsed for a 12-date tour to promote it. In the end, because they had to go back to college, they managed to squeeze in only one solitary gig to a crowd of undergraduates at the Alexander Hall in Princeton, New Jersey. Boylan said they were more organised in regard to the transport and equipment than the actual set and had only rehearsed a couple of times, but at each rehearsal they ran through some Becker and Fagen tunes with Boylan singing lead and Becker and Fagen joining in on harmony vocals. Becker and Fagen asked him to write out the set list and the keys of the songs before the gig and, although on many of the numbers they were figuring it out as they went along, they were very cool about the whole thing. The band was well received but it was to be Becker and Fagen’s first and last gig with Terence Boylan.

Bard had been subjected to regular drug busts throughout the Sixties and, on May 8, 1969 at 4.45am, at least two dozen cars belonging to state troopers descended on the college. At the same time, Sachs Annexe was ransacked by the Dutchess County Sheriff’s (Lawrence Quinlan) men. Quinlan, in tandem with the state troopers and a number of informants, searched two dormitories, several off-campus houses and arrested 44 people, among them Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and Fagen’s girlfriend, Dorothy White. Walter had already officially left Bard by this time but liked hanging out there and was sleeping on another student’s floor. Consequently the sheriff had warrants for everyone except him. Ironically, Gordon Liddy of subsequent Watergate fame was the assistant district attorney that year, and they typed a warrant up for Walter anyway for fourth-degree possession of marijuana. Walter called Liddy The Wild Bill Hickok of the Judiciary.

Fagen was dragged off to Poughkeepsie jail with the others, and the most traumatic part of the ordeal was having his treasured long hair shorn. Sitting in the cell in his standard issue prisoner’s uniform with cropped hair, Fagen looked very sorry for himself.

Bob Dylan had earlier made his comment on the predictability of the Bard drugs raids (Must bust in early May/Orders from the DA) in his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. In the same song the couplet, The pump don’t work/Cos the vandals took the handles also purportedly refers to an incident at Bard.

The college freed the 36 students (eight were non-students) arrested by providing bail bonds totalling $141,000. Their legal fees alone came to some $1,800, but the bail bonds and legal fees would eventually be billed to the students.

At a hastily convened meeting of those arrested, lawyers advised everyone to keep their experiences confidential. They pointed out that an officer is supposed to announce his purpose and state that he has a warrant for that purpose; if the suspect requests to see the warrant, the officer must show it. But even if the suspect doesn’t request to see the warrant, it does not validate the lawfulness of the arrest. Also, physical force could be used to enter a room if there is the possibility that evidence could be destroyed between the time of the knock and the answer. The President of the college, Reamer Kline, assured the students that the college would stand behind them.

Force had indeed been used on several of the doors in Ward Manor and students were ordered to do different things: some to stay in bed, others to get out of bed so that it could be searched, while others were body-searched. The officers’ biggest mistake proved to be in not identifying themselves to the students.

According to the students, officers were hooting and laughing as they searched rooms and they even played a Beatles album in one of them. Posters were ripped down, beds were torn apart, curtains were pulled down and fireplaces inspected. Almost all the rooms were left in total chaos and, as quickly as the police had descended, a crowd of students gathered and began chanting Pigs! One wag began playing ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ from West Side Story very loudly on his record deck.

Every spring they used to have a bust on campus, Becker said some years later. You know, just to raise a little hell in town and a little revenue for the local lawyers. But after all the fuss, all charges were later dropped. One month later, in June, Donald graduated and moved back to New York with his girlfriend.

Having graduated, Donald Fagen could now devote all his concentration to what had by now become his obsession – writing songs with Walter Becker. They had even settled on a suitable adjective to describe their material: Cheesy.

Chapter II

Shuffling Up Your Downs

Towards the end of 1969 Donald Fagen was holed up in a house on President Street in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Dorothy White, and a medical student called Richard Ransohoff. Walter Becker lived out in Queens with his sister and grandmother. Together, they began trying to sell these cheesy compositions to publishing companies in New York. Little did they realise how frustrating and arduous this would be.

Fresh out of college, Becker and Fagen knew next to nothing about the way the music business worked. Naïvely they decided to hawk material around music publishing offices in Manhattan without realising that this was antiquated and, indeed, legally unwise. But with the flush of youth and an optimism of which Mister Micawber would have been proud, they set out with their black-and-white songbook under their arms intent on impressing their worth upon some unsuspecting music publisher.

They didn’t even have a tape of their songs. They couldn’t afford the studio time to record even remotely proficient demos and even if they had been able to afford it, they lacked the necessary expertise to know how to approach a studio recording session. Without a demo tape – perhaps the single most essential ingredient needed to sell popular songs – they boldly opted for an old-fashioned personal performance.

More often than not they would be turned away at the door, but if the scrawny composers succeeded in bluffing their way past a succession of receptionists and secretaries, Fagen would take a seat at the omnipresent piano, Becker would stand alongside, they’d open their exercise book of lyrics and proceed to actually sing a selection of their songs for the startled publisher.

The limitations of the manner in which they imposed themselves upon world-weary publishers were soon evident. After only a couple of songs they would be told with ominous regularity and in no uncertain terms to leave forthwith, the words no commercial potential! resounding loudly in their ears. On other occasions, a telephone would ring during their performance or other trivial interruptions would break the listener’s concentration and their continuity. Even when